A guest column appears on Kennislink every two weeks. The columnist is always a different researcher, who writes from his or her field about the science behind an event in society or from our daily lives. This week Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk on March 8:International Women's Day.
For more than a century, March 8 has been International Women's Day. The reason for this was a strike in New York on March 8, 1908, against the poor working conditions of women in textile factories. But almost from the start, this day also more generally stood for the struggle for women's emancipation and equal rights for the sexes. The Netherlands celebrated Women's Day for the first time on March 8, 1912, so this year exactly one hundred years ago.
That is why different municipalities, political parties, and also the trade union movement, organize different activities in the context of Women's Day. This year's FNV meeting is called 'The power of women'. The theme of economic independence is high on the agenda there.
But do we still need Women's Day in a country like the Netherlands? In 2011, the Central Bureau of Statistics headlined:“Labour participation of Dutch women is very high”. In 2009, 71.5 percent of Dutch women had paid work. Within Europe, only Denmark scored higher. Perhaps the goals in the Netherlands have been achieved with this historic milestone? For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the participation of Dutch women in the labor market was very low compared to other countries.
Some historians have even traced the low labor force participation in the Netherlands back to the prosperous seventeenth century. Due to the flourishing of trade and economy in the 'Golden Age' not only rich women, but also large groups of women from other layers of the population no longer had to work outside the home.
However, this image is incorrect. Recent research into women's labor in the period 1600-1800 shows that women were particularly economically active at that time. Widows, unmarried and married women, poorer and richer women:many of them worked in all kinds of branches of the economy. Not only did the flourishing trade offer them many opportunities in the commercial sector.
The textile industry also prospered, requiring many hands to spin and rinse yarn. Women often combined their shop, sewing or spinning work with taking care of the household and children. That is why historians have often not counted them as full-fledged workers.
If the labor participation of women was high up to and including the eighteenth century, the decline only took place in the nineteenth century. This decrease was indeed a fact, but the official figures for the nineteenth century are probably too low. Those who recorded who did what work in the Netherlands, for example, in 1899 did not count married women who worked as farmers in the family business. They also often did not include women who did seasonal work or who worked part-time.
This brings us back to current affairs. Because even though nowadays every woman counts in the statistics, Dutch women remain champions of part-time work. Less than half of the women in the Netherlands would be economically independent if her husband's job was lost for one reason or another. In addition, women still earn on average only 80% of men's wages. So after a hundred years, there are plenty of reasons to keep celebrating Women's Day.